Mrs Beeton couldn't cook but she could copy, reveals historian

If Mrs Beeton had been alive today she would be in trouble for plagiarism on a shocking scale, the Guardian Hay festival heard yesterday.

The image of the original domestic goddess and author of the definitive book on cookery and household management has been tainted. The real Mrs Beeton was in fact a strip of a girl who could not cook.

The historian Kathryn Hughes has written the definitive biography of a woman born in 1836 who became a template for hardworking housewives. Hughes became so obsessed with her that she mortgaged her flat so she could buy Mrs Beeton's collection of letters.

Isabella Beeton was only 21 when she began cookery writing. Her first recipe for Victoria sponge was so inept that she left out the eggs. Seven years later she was dead. How did she come to write the seminal book? "The answer is she copied everything," Hughes said.

It took Hughes five years to track down the recipes which she discovered had been brazenly copied by Mrs Beeton, almost word for word, from books as far back as the Restoration.

But Hughes says we should not necessarily think badly of Mrs Beeton. "Although she was a plagiarist, she was adding value. She was an extraordinary innovator." Mrs Beeton had the radical idea of putting the ingredients at the start of the recipe. She also came up with the thought that it might be a good idea to write how long something should be cooked for.

Hughes' book, The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton, tells how the cookery writer was the eldest girl of 21 children who grew up living in Epsom racecourse's grandstand, complete with huge kitchen. She married a flash and dashing publisher called Sam Beeton and got involved with his woman's magazine.

After their first child died Sam Beeton suggested that his young wife became the cookery writer. The original Household Management was a 24-edition part work done on the cheap. After she died Sam Beeton and subsequent publishers recognised the need to keep the Mrs Beeton brand alive. "They pretended that she hadn't died. They went on producing the book with updated prefaces suggesting that she was still alive."

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